Learning?

This is a discussion on Learning? within the A Brief History of Cprogramming.com forums, part of the Community Boards category; I was having a discussion the other day with my teacher about the future development of a real AI. In ...

Learning?

I was having a discussion the other day with my teacher about the future development of a real AI. In my opinion a real AI is one that can learn, grow, and act independent of everything. We decided that the key to it all was one simple question. How does something learn? Not, how do you learn? But, how does the actual learning take place? A truly mind boggling question for me. I speculated, but that's all. We think that learning is the key, everything can work off of that in one way or another. If anyone out there has any insight into this matter I would like to hear it.

I'd say learning takes place from a series of events, depending on the situation and the state of mind. I don't really have enough to say right now, but I hope this turns into a very detailed thread with a lot of explanatory posts. I like the topic of this thread a lot. Good thinking!

How can a machine be made to learn like a human? Learning has much to do with experiences and a machine's experiences would be vastly different from those of a human. And if it did learn, would we be able to recognize it as learning when it is so vastly different from our own learning?

Good point. However, what if learning truly depends on the individual? Sure, there are some innate succeptabilities in humans that allow us a certain amount of knowledge of what will be learned from a given experience, but with a machine we are dealing with an entirely different set of succeptabilities that we won't know are there until we try to teach it something and it learns an entirely different lesson than was intended. If it learns a lesson at all.

[refuses to discuss religion][paraphasing]An individual: an entity with a unique identity with awareness of self and at least some consequences of its actions.[/paraphrasing](or is it...?)[/refuses to discuss religion]

Learning to me is the ability to recognize and remember patterns. To that end, I see no reason why AI can't "learn" in the future, although you are probably right, it will likely learn different things than a human would learn.

They have already made AI that can learn, theres even some basic 'learning' in video games where the computer adapts to the way you play. (I cant name any off the top of my head, but i'm certain ive seen it mentioned in some games).

Obvious patterns may not be obvious. And what happens if the machine starts extrapolating patterns from a few occurences?

I'm not saying it'll be easy, but I just think it'll be possible. Extrapolating patterns from few occurences is extremely common with human learning as well, ie a person "learning" that traveling is too dangerous based off one plane crash. And how many times have you seen humans NOT learning the obvious when the obvious is hitting them in the face? Its a problem with human learning but it is in no way a unmoveable obstacle. I don't see why it should be with machine learning as well.

Well Weak AI is now in existance,, we see them in variuos systems and machines.. but Real AI(i.e think on won, take decesion, undersand etc..) will take another century maybe... Technology such as Neural Science are aiming to learn how our brain works and are also researching wheather this can be done with machines...

But i think it will take another 100 or 200 years. THis may sound too long in the era of computers..